


Baby On Board

by Nny



Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: Accidental Baby Acquisition, Alternate Universe - Firefly Setting, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-24
Updated: 2019-03-24
Packaged: 2019-11-29 09:02:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18221039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nny/pseuds/Nny
Summary: “What in thegorram hell,” Bucky shouted, “is ababydoing on the ship?”





	Baby On Board

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lissadiane](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lissadiane/gifts).



“What in the gorram hell,” Bucky muttered, striding across the cargo hold to where the small crate lay. The inside of it was packed tight with a purple sweater that Steve had knitted for Clint after the job on one of the rim planets, when Clint had damn near frozen to death. Lying on top of that -

“What in the  _gorram_   _hell_ ,” Bucky shouted, “is a  _baby_  doing on the ship?”

The tiny thing startled, shaking awake, and its tiny fists clenched and its tiny mouth opened, a noise like one of Tony’s sirens filling the cavernous room. Bucky took an automatic step backwards, flinching at the loud hark back to engine failures and hull damage and that time a mutated rat had got into the ducts.

“Ah yes, good work,” Wanda snapped, emerging from behind the crates with a nutrient pouch in one hand and a mug of steaming water in the other. “Of course you are left alone with him for one minute and you make him cry. Hold these.” Barely pausing to make sure Bucky had a grip, she bent to pick up the baby, crooning at it softly and gently stroking its back. “Yes,” she said, “yes, it’s okay, his face is scary for all of us.”

“Did you -” Bruce walked through the hatch, tripping on his way through and then turning, startled, as though the layout of the ship was still a surprise to him. He was carrying a large syringe without a needle and something that might’ve been a stuffed animal, once upon a time. “Oh, he’s awake. Good.” He walked over to Bucky and took the nutrient pouch, crumbling the block into the steaming mug and swirling it around with the end of the syringe.

“What in the go tsao de -”

“ _Language_ ,” Steve snapped, and great, the whole damned gang was here.

“What in,” Bucky said, slowly, and carefully, and perfectly articulated, “the  _actual fuck_  is going on here, cap?”

“Barton brought him aboard,” Steve said. “We were out in the black before I found out about it, and if you think I’m gonna risk the little guy’s health by dumping him on some -” he paused, then reached forward and carefully cupped his hands over the baby’s ears. “Some shee-niou space station -”

Bruce took the mug, carefully loading up the syringe with the nutrient-rich sludge, and Bucky took the opportunity to throw his hands up at the lot of them and stalk off to one of the staircases up to the metal catwalk, thundering across to the hatch to the bridge. Clint - who had his feet up on the dash, and was attempting to balance an arrow on his nose - flinched himself upright at his crashing entrance.

“I didn’t do it,” he said, automatically, and Bucky glowered, folding his arms across his chest.

“You didn’t bring the baby on board.”

“Oh that. Yeah, I did that,” Clint said, breaking eye contact and turning to fiddle with something that Bucky was pretty sure didn’t require any fiddling.

“Why,” Bucky asked, “what were you talking about?”

“The… baby?” Clint said, and tried for an innocent grin, but he didn’t have the kind of face that wore innocent so well, and he still wasn’t meeting Bucky’s eyes.

Bucky shook his head, decided to deal with one problem at a time. They could deal with whatever the hell else Clint had messed up later.

“Wanna tell me why we’ve got a gorram baby aboard a futzin’  _pirate ship_?”

Clint’s smile settled a little more firmly into reality, at that, ‘cos he’d been trying to get them to call it a pirate ship for months but Steve had refused to let it catch on.

“It didn’t like that planet,” Clint said, a little defiant. “It said the food was terrible.”

“Clint -”

Clint shrugged off the hand Bucky rested on his shoulder, looking at nothing particular real intently.

“They were sellin’ him, Buck,” he snapped. “I hadta -” His voice frayed to nothing against the sharp words.

“Shit,” Bucky said.

Trafficking was big on the worlds on the rim. There was never enough labour, never enough cheap sex, never enough - if the inner planets’ news holos were to be believed - meat. Never enough contraception and too many mouths to feed…

The lucky ones, like Natalia, ended up trained as Companions. Bucky would never, not  _ever_  call her experience lucky to her face.

The unlucky ones -

Clint’d been sold by his brother. He didn’t like to talk about it.

Bucky approached carefully. Got into his eyeline, 'cos his aids weren’t so good with ambient sounds and Bucky’d always walked soft.

“I  _had_  to,” Clint said miserably, and Bucky crouched down in front of him, didn’t touch until Clint signed that it was okay. Wasn’t more'n a second, then, before they were standing and Clint was wrapped up tight in his arms - he insisted on sleeping that way, too, called it a comfort. Bucky suspected he liked the reassurance that Bucky would never let him go, and hell if anyone was ever gonna pry his metal arm loose.

“Intrigued to know how the hell you figure we’re gonna look after a baby on a damn smuggling boat,” Bucky said, rocking Clint back and forth a little, breathing warm against his hair. “We got sharp edges, we got unprotected gorram drops, we got  _Tony_  -”

“Tony’s good with kids!” Clint protested, and Bucky snorted.

“Tony  _is_  a gorram kid. Not sure if we’ve got an actual adult on this whole ship, unless you count Natalia, and I’d like to see you ask her to look after a baby.” Clint tensed a little in Bucky’s arms, and a horrible suspicion crept into his mind. “I mean,” he said, slow and careful, “what kinda space-brained idiot would agree to look after a baby that ain’t even their own kin?”

“Yeah,” Clint said, picking at the buttons on Bucky’s jacket fretfully, “about that…”

 

* * *

 

Bucky paces back and forth, hands woven tight into his hair, the plates on the left catching and pulling at strands of it, short sharp pains that won’t let him focus on a single gorram thought. Across the shuttle Natalia lounges on the silk that covers her bed, her practical tank and heavy-duty leather pants in stark contrast.

“I can’t believe he -”

“He didn’t cheat on you.” Her voice cuts across his, severing his words at the root before they even make it out to the air. Her expression is neutral, impossible to read, but the speed of her argument says a lot.

“Bruce says, nearest guess, the kid is eight, nine months old. We’ve been together near enough two years, so how the hell you can -”

“You’ve been together since the moment you kissed Clint for the first time. Seventeen months and twelve days ago,” she says, precisely, and there’s the barest curve of a smile on her face. “He was very excited.”

It’s easy to picture that, Bucky’s walked in on them often enough - Clint sitting on the floor and leaning up against the bed, gesturing wildly as Natalia strokes through his hair. He has a moment of coiling sweetness, low in his belly, but he ruthlessly stomps it back into submission.

“It was before that,” he argues, thinking back over shared treats, lingering looks, hours in the cockpit talking about nothing and everything as they meandered through the black. “We were taking it slow, sure, but -”

“But Clint is as perceptive as a stunned mollusc,” she says, which he has to admit is the truth. “Seventeen months and  _thirteen_  days ago he gave up on you, temporarily. Despite the evidence I presented that you were just as idiotically smitten as him.”

A dull flush burned in Bucky’s cheeks. He couldn’t deny it - he’d been goddamn twitterpated, almost as soon as Steve’d dragged him on board. He hadn’t expected to feel that way so quickly - hadn’t expected to feel much of anything, not so soon after escaping the clutches of whatever hell lurked under the wholesome facade of the Alliance. But then there’d been Clint, beaming and grease-stained and making terrible fuckin’ puns about his arm, and Bucky had been neck deep before he’d even realised he’d started to sink.

He remembers that day, though. They’d had a couple days planetside, first time in over a month, and Clint had disappeared the first day, slinking off before Bucky could even suggest all the plans he’d had. He’d returned in the early hours, but Bucky’d still dragged him out of bed in the morning, hauling him out to the empty field by their landing site and presenting him with the boomerang he’d found in a junker’s haul weeks before, trading more than he ought to’ve just for the chance of seeing Clint smile.

It’d been a good one, that smile, wide and kinda incredulous, and Bucky - all of a sudden - had had enough of working not to kiss it. Had felt like the luckiest guy in the gorram system, when Clint had kissed him back. Sun against his back and Clint’s warmth all along the front of him as he’d pressed himself closer, trying to live up to everything he’d ever dreamed, and all the while Clint’d just -

“So, what? He takes a day out on a backwater planet and knocks up the first girl he sees?”

“So he visited his ex-wife,” she says, which is a hell of a small sentence for the magnitude of the revelation inside of it. “But, otherwise, yes.”

Bucky runs the backs of his fingers along his stubbled jaw, thinking hard. Trying to work out what the hell to feel.

“Never thought he was the hit ‘em and quit 'em type,” he says, after a moment, and Natalia snorts.

“It’s not hard to see a disaster like Clint coming,” she says. “Bobbi’s smart enough not to let him hang around. Again.”

“Not smart enough to avoid him all together, though?”

Natalia sighs a little, an intimate noise that sends another flush through him.

“Well you know how Clint is,” she says. “He always works so very,  _very_  hard to please.”

And sure, it’s dumb to be anything like possessive, especially when it comes to Nat, but he can’t help the way the metal plates grind as his hand balls up; he can’t help the scowl that comes along right after her laugh. And - the way she tells it, there have been 'misunderstandings’, in their past. Just 'cos he doesn’t remember doesn’t mean he doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing when he squares his shoulders and squares up to her; it doesn’t mean he doesn’t know what she’s going for when she slides her hand under the pillow all casual, neither.

“Bucky.”

Steve’s voice, coming from the doorway, 'cos he owns the ship and everything in her, but he’ll never come into Natalia’s shuttle without her asking. Bucky’s waiting for her to ask. He ain’t the only one who’s nowhere close to subtle.

“Clint needs me?” He asks, resigned that that’s all it’s gonna take to make him go.

“You need to ask?” Steve says, which is mean enough that Bucky jabs his elbow into Steve’s side as he walks past, sends him staggering into the doorframe like a falling tree.

 

* * *

 

Bucky finds Clint on his second try; the quarters they’ve been practically sharing for the last ten months had been empty and pristine in a way he hasn’t seen them for nine months, thirty days. He stands in them for a moment, registering the strangeness of the absence of the socks he’s always bitching about; registering how miserable the space he keeps on whining for can feel. He climbs back out of the room and makes his way along the corridor, considers heading the cockpit but finds his feet carrying him a different route instead. It’s familiar enough, though - all the nights he’d leaned against the metal wall out here, cursing himself for not gathering the courage to knock.

He expects more chaos, when he pushes open the hatch to Clint’s old quarters, almost smacking his head as he descends the ladder 'cos they’re designed so much smaller and more awkward than his. He expects - crying, from at least one of them, vomit, the same. He’s right about the exhaustion, at least, 'cos they’re sacked out on the narrow bunk together, Clint’s big hand covering almost the whole of the baby’s back, anchoring him and checking he’s still breathing, both.

Bucky has a moment of weakness - hits him right in the damned knees - and he’s on his ass on the floor with his knees around his ears before he can even breathe through what this does to him. Clint blinks his eyes open, his hand flexing against the kid’s tiny back, and this ain’t a pirate ship it’s a fuckin’ love boat, 'cos Bucky all of a sudden wants to grow old with his idiot ass.

“Hey,” Clint says, barely breathing it out, wincing when that’s still enough to make the baby scowl and shudder in a breath, consider - for a moment - waking. They both play dead until he smacks his lips and sleeps again, flickering movement behind impossibly thin eyelids, his face like Clint’s in miniature, his scowl willing to pretend at being Bucky’s.

It’s too much. Bucky’s heart ain’t built for this, not any more.

 _This is gonna suck_ , he signs, and he has to knock gently on the floor to get Clint back, 'cos he tilts his head up and focuses hard on the underside of the bunk above him when he sees what Bucky’s got to say. What he hadn’t quite meant to say, not exactly like that.

 _I’m gonna suck at this_ , he tries again, and he ain’t exactly sure what Clint is getting from the smile he tries on, 'cos from this side of it it feels shaky as all hell.

Clint shifts like he’s gonna sign something back, but there’s a protesting huff when he moves his hand, so he settles for shaking his head instead, building up static in his mussed hair from the plabric of the pillow. Bucky considers nodding back, insistent, until they’re both dizzy with it, but instead he takes a fizzing breath, flexing his hands a couple times until they’ll stop shaking for him.

 _I’m gonna try,_  he signs, and he doesn’t expect the shuddered breath Clint takes, the way his eyes slam shut, the slow track of tears outta the corner of his eyes. He’s tired, that’s probably most of what it is, but Bucky still crawls in close and rubs his thumb against wet skin, breathing out soothing comfort against the worried lines that are scoring Clint’s skin. Down by his elbow there’s a hitching breath and then a tiny pale blue glower that hits him right in the chest, and it’s like drowning, this feeling. He remembers it well.


End file.
